Rankin smoked a minute in silence.  “How would it do to move into civilization six months of the year—­the Winter six?” he suggested.

Scotty considered for a moment.  “Do you mean that seriously?” he asked.

“Yes.”

By the sense of feeling alone, the Englishman rolled a cigarette skilfully.  “How about the stock here while we’re gone,” he said hesitatingly.  “Do you suppose we’d find anything left when we came back in the Spring?”

Rankin crowded the half-burned tobacco down into the pipe-bowl with his little finger.  “I don’t think you got the idea,” he explained.  “My plan was for you to go East in the Fall and put the kids in school.  I’d stay here and see that everything ran smoothly while you were gone.  Mrs. Baker has said a dozen times that she wanted a change—­for a time, anyway.”

Scotty threw one long leg over the other.  “As usual you’re right, Rankin,” he said slowly.  “The Lord knows Mollie gets restless enough at times.  People were like ants in a hill where she was raised, and that life was a part of her.”  He took a last puff at the cigarette, and with a toss sent the smoking stump spinning like a firefly into the darkness.  “And Flossie can’t grow up wild—­I know that.  I’ll talk your suggestion over with Mollie first, but I think I’d be safe in saying right now that we’ll accept.”

For a moment Rankin did not speak; then he knocked the ashes out of his pipe upon his heel.

“Excuse me if I keep going back to something unpleasant, Baker,” he said slowly, “but in considering the matter there’s one thing I don’t want you to forget.”  Then, after a meaning pause, he went on:  “It’s the same reason I had for not introducing Ben in the first place.”

Scotty drew out his book of rice-paper again almost involuntarily.

“I’d thought of that this time,” he said; then paused to finger a gauzy sheet absently.  “I don’t see why I should consider it now, though—­seeing I didn’t before.”

Rankin said nothing, and conversation lapsed.  Irresistibly, but so gradually as to be all but unconscious, the spirit of the prairie night—­a sensation, a conception of infinite vastness, of unassailable serenity—­stole over and took possession of the men.  The ambitious and manifold artificial needs for which men barter their happiness, their sense of humanity, even life itself, seemed beyond belief out there alone with the stars, with the prairie night-wind singing in the ears; seemed so puny that they elicited only a smile.  The lust of show, of extravagance, follies, wisdoms, man’s loves and hates—­how their true proportions stand revealed against the eternal background of immeasurable distance, in nature’s vast scheme!

Scotty cleared his throat.  “I used to think, when I first came here, that I’d been a fool; but now, somehow, at times like this, I wonder if I didn’t blunder into the wisest act of my life.”  The prairie spirit had taken hold of him.  “And the longer I stay the more it grows upon me that such a life as this, where one’s success is not the measure of another’s failure, is the only one to live.  It is the only life,” he added after a pause.